If anyone needs saving, it’s Freud. The practice of
psychoanalysis has long since disappeared from the list of effective treatments
for medical illness. Freud’s ideas still exert considerable influence on the
culture, but who knows how long that will last.

Enter Mark Solms. The South African psychoanalyst invented
what he calls neuropsychoanalysis. Recently, he was the subject of a fawning
article by Kat McGowan in Discover Magazine.

Unfortunately, the article reads like the kind of puff piece
that a PR agency might send out. It
grants Freud credit for ideas that were not his and ignores work
that would disprove the neuropsychoanalytic project.

McGowan gives it away in her title: “The Second Coming
of Sigmund Freud.” Thereby she shows that the truth of Freud lies in religion,
not science. If she had wanted to be Freudian, she should have discussed the
return of the repressed.

The Freud who apparently has returned from the dead is not
really the same as the Freud who invented psychoanalysis. McGowan credits Freud
with the concept of unconscious mental processing and says that neuroscience
now accepts it as something of a fact.

In truth, Freud did not invent the notion of unconscious
mental processing. He opened his Interpretation
of Dreams by saying that his concept of the unconscious differed radically
from other versions that saw it in terms of unconscious mental processing.

The Freudian unconscious was structured like a Greek
tragedy; it was filled with depraved wishes that dreams were trying to show
fulfilled. Where Solms talks about ordinary human wishes, “to be competent, to be healthy, to be at home,” Freud believed that
the secret of dreams lay in your wish to copulate with your mother. Freud was
contemptuous of everyday human wishes.

Here McGowan explains Solms’ misinterpretation of Freud:

Freud
put the unconscious on the throne of the mental kingdom, but the subjectivity
problem led brain scientists to ignore the plentiful evidence of unconscious
mental processing for nearly a century. How could they measure mental activity
that subjects weren’t even aware of themselves? It wasn’t until the 1980s that
researchers began to solve this conundrum.

Thousands
of studies have proven that people process most information, especially social
data like other people’s behavior, unconsciously.

The
nature of unconscious thought that emerges from contemporary experiments is
radically different from what Freud posited so many years ago: It looks more
like a fast, efficient way to process large volumes of data and less like a
zone of impulses and fantasies.

But, if today’s version of unconscious thought differs
radically, as McGowan correctly says, from Freud’s theory, the connection
between the two must be more nominal than real.

Also, McGowan ignores completely today’s
cognitive-behavioral therapies and the theories that underlie them. One assumes
that Solms does also. For most people today cognitive therapy or a variation
thereupon has become the treatment of choice for depression. In ignoring it neuropsychoanalysts
create a false choice, between medication and psychoanalysis.

Note the following description of a new treatment of
depression that would apparently be consistent with neuropsychoanalysis:

Helen
Mayberg explains that her work on depression strives to describe the same
overarching concepts that Freud invoked, including links between brain circuits
and disordered moods. “Analysis has a much richer tapestry of both words and
concepts” than neurobiology, says Mayberg. “The things Freud wrote about are
things that every awake person on the planet thinks about.” She has pioneered
the treatment of profound depression with deep-brain stimulation, a technique
that stimulates precise brain locations with electricity, but she recognizes
that she cannot yet account for why some patients improve so dramatically and
others do not.

In his second coming Freud is now the inspiration for “deep-brain
stimulation.” Does this not sound like ECT, electroconvulsive therapy. As
you know, it is anything but a new discovery? Surely, it is not Freudian.

By ignoring cognitive treatments McGowan is showing that
neuropsychoanalysis fails one of the basic tests of science. As Richard Feynman
said, and as I quoted in The Last Psychoanalyst, true science includes the data that tends to disprove its
hypotheses. To ignore alternative treatments that have been shown to be
successful is to practice pseudo-science.

Solms offers a fairly standard American version of
psychoanalytic treatment. Unfortunately, it is not really Freudian:

The
analyst helps the unhappy patient notice destructive patterns in his own life,
especially where he avoids painful memories or feelings. “Analysis is about
having somebody help you to face facts that you would rather not face up to,”
says Solms. In practice, this talking cure translates into deep self-knowledge.

Yet, Freud had no real interest in having patients face
facts. He wanted them to accept their repressed wishes and desires. You might
call these facts, if that makes you happy, but they are not objective
realities.

And of course, the talking cure does not translate into deep
self-knowledge. It translates into knowledge of Freud’s theories, into an
ability to wrap yourself up in a mythic narrative.

According to Solms, even patients who have suffered brain
damage suffer because they prefer living in their fantasies than facing the
facts.

Solms
began to systematically evaluate the hallucinations and delusions of his
patients in the light of Freudian concepts like denial and wish fulfillment.
Simply put, these two ideas propose that we prefer to see the world as we wish
it were, rather than as it truly is. Facing the facts is difficult, requiring
sustained mental labor and a high-functioning brain. A person who cannot
sustain this effort winds up living in a fantasy world.

Rather
than face facts, these patients unconsciously chose to live out the fantasy
that they are well. The content of the patients’ delusions revealed ordinary
human wishes: It was poignant and fascinating. “There’s much tragedy and pain
involved, but from a scientific point of view, it was like being a kid in the
toy shop,” says Solms.

Of course, Freudian treatment is about exploring fantasies
and dreams. Its practitioners assume that once they rip away the illusory world
of drams their patients will naturally come to inhabit reality.

If you want a treatment that systematically provides a
reality check about all of your misapprehensions, you will find it with a
cognitive therapist, not with a Freudian analyst.

Solms seems to believe that patients are lost in pleasant
fantasies, in a dream world. If he wants to be a true Freudian he should
prescribe a multi-year journey into the recesses of one’s unconscious mind to
discover that those fantasies are really covering a wish to copulate with one’s
mother.

And yet, once a patient discovers that his motives and
intentions are completely depraved, he will most likely see himself as a morally
deficient being. At that point, he might well become depressed and demoralized,
but he will hardly be ready to face the real world of facts.

As for the notion that psychoanalytic thought is humanistic,
as McGowan claims, we must note that Freud himself thought that human beings
were trash. He was less interested in helping them than he was in making them
into Freudians.